Abstract
The purpose of this study is to map the literature on mental health and well-being of university students using metadata extracted from 5,561 journal articles indexed in the Web of Science database for the period 1975–2020. More specifically, this study uses bibliometric procedures to describe and visually represent the available literature on mental health and well-being in university students in terms of the growth trajectory, productivity, social structure, intellectual structure, and conceptual structure of the field over 45 years. Key findings of the study are that research on mental health and well-being in university students: (a) has experienced a steady growth over the last decades, especially since 2010; (b) is disseminated in a wide range of journals, mainly in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, and education research; (c) is published by scholars with diverse geographical background, although more than half of the publications are produced in the United States; (d) lies on a fragmented research community composed by multiple research groups with little interactions between them; (e) is relatively interdisciplinary and emerges from the convergence of research conducted in the behavioral and biomedical sciences; (f) tends to emphasize pathogenic approaches to mental health (i.e., mental illness); and (g) has mainly addressed seven research topics over the last 45 years: positive mental health, mental disorders, substance abuse, counseling, stigma, stress, and mental health measurement. The findings are discussed, and the implications for the future development of the field are highlighted.
Highlights
The entrance to the university marks a period of transition for young people
A bibliometric approach was used in this study to map the literature on mental health and well-being in university students over the last 45 years using metadata extracted from four indexes of the Web of Science (WoS): The Science Citation IndexExpanded (SCI-Expanded); the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI); the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI); and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)
The trends demonstrate a gradual increase in the scholarly interest in the mental health of university students over the last 45 years that can be organized in three stages: an emergence stage, in which publications rose slowly (1975–2000); a fermentation stage, with a notable increase in publications in the field (2000–2010); and a take-off stage, during which the number of records published per year in the field has almost risen 10 times (2010–2020)
Summary
The entrance to the university marks a period of transition for young people. Through this transition, students face new challenges, such as making independent decisions about their lives and studies, adjusting to the academic demands of an ill-structured learning environment, and interacting with a diverse range of new people. Many students must, often for the first time, leave their homes and distance themselves from their support networks (Cleary et al, 2011). These challenges can affect the mental health and well-being of higher education students. The probabilities of experiencing common psychological problems, such as depression, anxiety, and stress, increase throughout adolescence and reach a peak in early adulthood around age 25 (Kessler et al, 2007) which makes university students a vulnerable population
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